Below is a complete archive of all the news stories we've ever posted, broken down by month. Apologies for any missing pictures - the recent host change has seen a few images go walkabout. As I come across them, I'll find them and reinsert them. But I'm sure you'd rather I worked on the all new site than recover 7 year old images.

The clear lines between DJ, musician and performance artist just got a little more blurred with this video. Eboman samples live audio and video and with his SenSorSuit, he dances like your dad at a wedding after a few beers and puts together a totally live set with audio samples played on the drum kit. I'm especially impressed with the pseudo scratching performed with the live video grabs.

While I wait and wait and wait for Vestax to drop a VCI-300 off on my doorstep, drool over this clip featuring the ever present Sam Gribben from Serato, and Deeznotes (hey Deez! ) showing just what the VCI/ITCH combo can do. I think I let a little bit of wee go.

Itís not so often when Mac only DJ software comes along, but DJ-1800 is one such application. Back when I had a job and pretended to work while idly passing the time surfing versiontracker.com, DJ-1800 seemed to pop up all the time, but for whatever reason, it never made it to hard disk for any length of time, as my scratch DJ mentality simply dismissed it as worthless to my life. But now I wear the all-seeing hat, Iíve downloaded the spanking new v3.2 to see if it impressed me more than it used to.

While new hardware might be increasingly thin on the ground these days, you can be sure that new and improved software is popping up all the time. This is great for the scene, but a royal pain in the nuts as software is actually harder to review. But I'm not complaining as new DVS on the block - Quad - has now reached v2. Rebuilt from the ground up, Quad2 now comes with a Mac version, that so far has run pretty smoothly on my seemingly vintage Powerbook.

In recent years, the European DJs have taken the scratch scene by storm, releasing their own new flavour of battle wax with a much more frantic and glitchy style. Leader of this new school is Le Jad - an atypical DJ and producer who dances very much to the beat of his own drum. His style has found favour with battle DJs and for the last 2 years has produced world title winning sets for Netik and Rafik respectively. But he does put out his own music and battle wax, and very kindly sent them to me. I figured I'd review them here while I work on hard on getting the skratch specific site up and running.

At DJ Show North, I picked up a leaflet that piqued my interest and confused the hell out of me all at the same time. ProDub is essentially a music licence for UK DJs, that allows them to copy music they own to different formats for use in the public arena. Just because you own the vinyl, doesn't mean you can rip it and play it at the club apparently, and that's where this licence comes in. For £250 a year, you can convert 5000 different files, be it 1 track to 5 different devices, or full CDs to MP3. Each conversion counts towards the 5000. Tish and piffle I hear you mutter - why should I shell out for such a thing you're saying. Well read on - if you use music in a public place, you may well be obliged to carry a ProDub card or not get work in the future. It might just be that the MP3 police have you in their sights.

When I started writing reviews, I didn't even have a camera - I simply used whatever images the manufacturers supplied. But as time went on, it became clear that the old "picture paints a thousand words" maxim was quite true, so I splashed the cash on a Canon Powershot A80, and thus my first tentative steps down the ridiculously expensive photography road was started. Now I'm rocking a Canon EOS 400D with Sigma lenses, a stupidly expensive but amazingly wonderful Manfrotto tripod, and a rather nifty pulldown home studio sat over my decks. And my efforts in this area do seem to garner a lot of praise (for which I am very grateful). And in honour of this growing hobby, I've now got a Flickr page up and running.

The problem with busting news stories early is that people who originally soiled themselves with excitement at the impending lump of fund clearing greatness to hit the market eventually begin to wonder if it was ever going to arrive. Well for many such people who have waited patiently for the day that their beloved old mixer would get a much need fader transplant, that day is here. The Innofader is beginning to ship in quantity, primarily to the US, but for those of you who just can't wait, Audio Innovate have also put up a link to buy directly from them.

There's a common misconception in the DJ scene that 2 channels = not but scratch mixer. This just isn't true at all. I accept that while 2 channel mixers are generally expected to be able to scratch, it doesn't necessarily have to be the case. And when you really think about it, a vast number of people who buy 4 channel mixers do so under the misconception that you can't mix on 2 channel mixers. Well you can, and the new Ecler NUO2.0 aims to please as many kinds of DJs as possible. I had it in for a while and it simply reinforced my long held feeling that there aren't scratch mixers and club mixers, but just mixers with different numbers of channels.

Serato don't release new things very often. But when they do, it's usually high profile and with a lot of users gushing endlessly across the interwebs. But one such product - or should I say service - was introduced as beta back in December 2006 and has stayed there, fanfare free, ever since. www.whitelabel.net is Serato's digital distribution service, aimed at replicating the old fashioned method of dishing out promo vinyl to DJs aka white labels (geddit?). And as a Scratch Live user, you get access to a heap of full quality MP3s across a broad spectrum of genres for free. Non-believers can still get access but at a paltry 32kps quality - good enough to get a feel for the track, but not good enough to use as internet trading currency.

I'm just as guilty as anyone else - iPhone mania gripped me by the throat and made me crave one so badly that I would sell not only my own kidneys, but mug other people for their body parts as well. But then a little voice nagged away at me - no, not the bank manager, but the usually quiet voice of Apple reason: "Take a step back, a deep breath and look at the iPhone - does it really do everything you need it to?" whispered the voice like a nasty little heretic. As it turns out, it doesn't. The lack of tethering made it an expensive toy, not in anyway suitable for me or my needs. And as I sit here, watching my RSS reader do iPhone overtime from associated Mac and music sites, a heap of music apps are now popping up left right and centre. But you have to ask yourself something - is the iPhone really the best tool for such things? Will a 3G take the relentless hammering into an MPC style application from hundreds of early morning commuters? Do you really want to control Scratch Live or Protools with a tiny touchscreen? Well do you?

It's not secret that I'm a shameless Mac fanboy. I've been using them in one form or other for close to 2 decades. And right now Apple are going through a transition into something more than just a computer company. The iPod owns the MP3 player scene and the iPhone looks set to take over the phone market as well, especially if the new iPhone Nano rumours (it's a given really) are true. But when a touch screen patent application turns up, complete with virtual turntables, it's time to take a closer look.

DJs are having to adapt to change. The new wave of digital gear is making DJs think about the way they work and the gear they buy. Effects are becoming increasingly popular with all kinds of DJs, as are samplers and loopers. But many of these have astronomical price tags and a learning curve that often sees the highly desirable object become an expensive doorstop. But imagine if you could buy one tiny box that dips its toe into all these areas, and barely make a dent in your bank balance... that's the Korg KAOSSILATOR that is.

Imagine that you're a DJ lab rat, tasked with designing the next big thing for the controllerists to splash their cash and other bodily fluids on. You're sat there with a heap of sketches laid out in front of you, only wishing that you had left enough in the R&D piggy bank to have them all turned into actual working prototypes. Well now it seems that you can - point a camera at your sketches and via a probably complex homebrew solution of motion sensing, Traktor becomes your bitch. Welcome to the world of DJ Mocap.

Thanks to the several people who mailed this - I saw it on Engadget too.